I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.
In clear and unshrinking prose, Harriet Jacobs--writing under the pseudonym of "Linda Brent"--relates the story of her girlhood and adolescence as a slave in North Carolina and her eventual escape- a bildungsroman set in the complex terrain of a chauvinist, white-supremacist society. Resolutely addressing women readers, rather than men, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl sought to make white women understand the ways that the threat of sexual violence shaped the lives of enslaved black women and children.
